After 1992, when the owner died and it no longer operated as a shoe repair shop, you could still see piles of unclaimed shoes through the windows. The instep was damaged when a car collided with it in 1997, but the intrusion was repaired. The Deschwanden family put the shoe and an adjacent house on the market in early 2000, and it was open for business -- as a shoe repair shop, natch! -- in 2003.